Here's the real problem at hand, the Amateur Radio manufactures haven't found a method to design & build a multi-mode Digital transceiver that will operate FDMA, TDMA, CDMA & MFSK (D-Star). Here in northern Illinois there are quite a few D-Star repeaters and the ICOM Product is backwards compatible with Analog FM signals. When System Designers analyzed the basic repeater coverage they would provide coverage as 90%, 70% and 50% for each system. I'll use an example, if the 90% coverage was 25 air miles radius, 70% would be 32 air miles radius and for the 50% would be 37.5 air miles radius for system coverage. Whereas using the Digital D-Star Repeater coverage will be 36.75 air miles radius so using Digitaling signaling provides much better coverage. This reminds me of HF AM versus SSB as that took a few years to take hold and now almost everyone is using the SSB mode. I would invest in D-Star and use the Digital mode for the repeaters and on simplex.